


Influenza

by Chikita



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Crack, Crack Treated Seriously, Gen, Humor, Instagram, Kageyama is stupid, Memes, Naughty Pictures, Social Media
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-15
Updated: 2019-05-15
Packaged: 2020-03-05 20:37:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18836329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chikita/pseuds/Chikita
Summary: As a volleyball obsessed weirdo, Kageyama wasn't exactly familiar with the internet, let alone social media. But it seems like he's forced to work with it one day if he wants to become a "trendsetter" like Oikawa. In other words: Kageyama makes an Instagram account. A horrible idea, really.





	Influenza

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [Influenza](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18830278) by [Chikita](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chikita/pseuds/Chikita). 



> Written for a friend in the German part of the fandom with the prompt "Kageyama heard Oikawa is considered a trendsetter, so he wants to become a trendsetter too (because "setter" lol)" Also, headcanon that Kageyama doesn't have a clue how the internet works.
> 
> Not a native speaker, but I still tried to make this somewhat funny because people liked the original.

Kageyama had never been one of those super popular people everyone instantly grew to love. He wasn’t Hinata, who managed to wrap even complete strangers around his little finger with a few words of encouragement. He wasn’t Suga either, who could lift the mood of a whole team with his trademark smile. Honestly, Kageyama had never really cared. His strengths were in other areas. Like Volleyball. Or sleeping through thunderstorms, or maybe eating a whole meat bun in two bites. One couldn’t be good at everything after all. But ever since their failed semi-final attempt against Seijoh, he knew, that there were still many things he had to work on if he wanted to be a real professional setter. He had just never expected the extent of it...

 

\---

One day, when Kageyama and the rest of his team were all sitting in the club room after volleyball practice, the setter was painfully reminded of his shortcomings. For some reason, Tanaka had been reading out of the current issue of the “Monthly Volleyball” magazine this day. The Karasuno volleyball club was rarely mentioned in said magazine, due to their lack of success in recent years, but then there were other teams from the prefecture already hogging all the attention. Namely, Aoba Johsai and Shiratorizawa.

“That Oikawa’s such a smug asshole, look what they wrote! It says he’s not just an impressive volleyball player, but also a “trendsetter”. Bullshit! Just look at the ugly photo they took of him! He looks like a lil’ bitch,” Tanaka voiced his opinion of the lil’ bitch...er...Aoba Johsai captain and held the open magazine over his head like a sign at a protest march.

The photo showed Oikawa, who would have thought, dressed in expensive-looking clothes, smiling at the camera and making a peace sign. Kageyama wondered, what was supposed to be so ugly about the picture. He had already seen significantly uglier people than Oikawa. And wasn’t “trendsetter” just another word for his volleyball position? After all, the word “setter” was in it. But then again, why wasn’t Oikawa wearing his normal practice clothes in the picture? And why the sunglasses? Summer was long over.

“Literally nobody cares,” Tsukishima murmured nonchalantly and continued to change out of his gym clothes, “I’m sure, nobody but you even reads this gossipy thing. That Oikawa guy can undress for a porn magazine for all I care, doesn’t mean it has to do anything with us.”

“Ahhh! You just gave me a mental image! Shame on you, Tsukki!”, Noya yelled, jumped up from the bench he was sitting on and hid his face in his hands in exaggerated horror. Yamaguchi, who was sitting next to an unimpressed Tsukishima stifled a giggle, and Tanaka went straight ahead to figuratively rip apart the rest of the article, using even more swear words, than Kageyama knew, which was honestly impressive. 

Even though the majority of the team, including Tsukishima, had nothing to add to the discussion but an eye-roll, a certain annoying red-head just had to answer his call.  
“Aww! I want to have articles written about me, too!”, Hinata yelled loudly enough, that Tsukishima was forced to cover his ears.

“Dumbass, why’s that even important to you? It’s just a magazine,” Kageyama tried to ground his overzealous partner, “Do you really want some weird pictures of your face in there? Who even wants to see that?” Grumbling and with his arms crossed over his chest, Hinata turned to his partner and shot him a reproachful look, that Kageyama had last seen from his mother.

“I’m surprised, that you don’t care about this. Isn’t Oikawa like...your biggest rival? Aren’t you annoyed, that they’re writing articles about him and not you?” Now, that hit a little close to home.

“Hinata, there isn’t a reason to make a fuss about it,” Suga intervened to de-escalate the situation, as if he had noticed Kageyama involuntarily tensing up at Hinata’s words, “Oikawa has made a name for himself in volleyball for the past three years, but that doesn’t mean we can’t beat him or his team.”

“Suga is right,” Daichi agreed with their vice-captain, “We should focus on what volleyball is _really_ about, and it certainly isn’t pretty pictures. And Hinata, you don’t have to rile up Kageyama all the time. We don’t need you to poison the atmosphere before our big tournament. I would also prefer if none of you were to undress for any kind of magazine until then, porn or not. You’re still underage." Hinata lowered his head in response as if undressing for a porn magazine had been his goal all that time.

“I mean, I get it, but don’t they always write about the best players of the prefecture? I want to be good enough, so they’ll write about me too. Just like the great king Oikawa or this Ushiwaka guy,” Hinata said pouting and let himself slump down again on his spot on the bench. Kageyama wanted to bring up Hinata’s horrible receives, and maybe say something like: “As long as you play like a klutz, no magazine in the world will ever be interested in you.” But instead, the thought about it. Hard. The dusty gears in his head were turning.

Oikawa obviously had something, that he didn’t have. If he wanted to beat him and go to nationals, he would have to beat him at every discipline, whether it was serving, passing or communicating with his teammates. Kageyama wouldn’t want to admit it, but Hinata had managed to hit a sore spot with his taunt. There was still so much he had to learn, and he would _never_ improve if he didn’t give his all.

After Hinata and he had said goodbye to the rest of the team and were now walking towards the spot, where their ways parted, Kageyama had made a decision. He would work hard to become the best trendsetter of the prefecture, at all costs.

“What’s with that pervy grin on your face? Are you planning something immoral?”, Hinata interrupted his thoughts and squeaked, when Kageyama grabbed his head as he always did and squeezed, the “pervy” grin on his face not disappearing, but growing even wider. Hinata would be so jealous if Kageyama managed to get a photo of himself in one of those volleyball magazines before he did. Just imagining his stupid face made Kageyama shiver with gleeful anticipation.

\---

 

“When Kageyama came home that day, he immediately headed for his room and looked for the laptop, his father had gifted him years ago for his birthday. After he spent about half an hour desperately searching for it, he finally found it under his bed, covered by a thick layer of dust and some cobwebs. The device must have been old as shit, but maybe today was his lucky day and he would manage to get it working again, at least before choking to death on all the lint flying through the air. Coughing and half-squinting, he carried the laptop to his almost empty, barely used desk and sat on the chair in front of it.

The sky-blue start screen informed him, that the old thing was still functional. What surprised him even more though, was, that it still had an internet connection. With trembling fingers, he tried using the touchpad to navigate to the pre-installed browser, but due to the poor controls, he ended up accidentally opening a folder, that his father had probably put on his desktop. A sudden feeling of horror swept over him as he was greeted by a collection of old baby photos he didn’t even know existed until now. Why did parents always have to take photos of you in the most embarrassing situations? He quickly deleted the whole folder.

At some point, it had taken him a good half hour, Kageyama finally found a search engine, that could hopefully answer his questions. He had to find out, what that fucking word meant after all. Luckily, the keyboard was much easier to work with than the touchpad. 

“What makes someone a good trendsetter?”, he awkwardly typed with two fingers and waited impatiently for the site to load. The first result confused him already. 

"Blogger, Influencer, Trendsetter - How to Become a Successful Influencer?" Strictly speaking, this online article was exactly what he was looking for. But wasn’t influenza a disease? Why would you deliberately catch a disease just to get into a magazine? Didn’t that make your face look all red and puffy in photos? _Gross!_ Kageyama tried to ignore the unpleasant feeling in his stomach, that reminded him of his last flu, where he had thrown up three times in the span of an hour and scrolled through the article. It was full of foreign sounding words, that he only recognized from tv commercials. Despite it all, he tried to get through and even though his head was buzzing at the end, he made some progress.

Apparently, a trendsetter, or “influenza” (Kageyama still felt uneasy about the word) was a person, who blogged about their life, took pictures for some kind of social media platform, and “sold” themselves so well, that they were able to influence other people and make them buy cosmetics...or something. Still confused, Kageyama frowned at the screen and squirmed on his chair, as his neck started to get stiff from his rigid posture after not moving for about an hour. If someone had previously told him, how stressful this whole “trendsetter”-thing was, he would have started much earlier. He still didn’t understand, what cosmetics and scantily clad women rolling around in flower beds had to do with volleyball. This didn’t get him any further.

So he tried something else. He typed “trendsetter Oikawa Tooru” into the search field and promptly landed on a page called “Instagram”. His eyes widened in surprise when he saw the many, almost professional-looking photos of his old rival. In some pictures, he made some weird arm movements, that looked as if he was having a seizure and in others, he almost looked like a normal human, if it wasn’t for his weird facial expressions. But that didn’t seem to detract from the popularity of these pictures. 

So that’s what being a trendsetter was all about. Kageyama had finally solved the riddle. A whole new world opened up in front of him. A world, full of colorful advertisements, little red hearts, and pictures of cats banging on bongo drums or biting into cheeseburgers. There were so many cat pictures. The sheer amount of fluff on this site confused him. But then there were also some...less innocent pictures. Some of them involving Oikawa too. He gulped. But now he at least understood what all those cosmetic articles were about.

“Fascinating,” Kageyama breathed awestruck and clicked through the profile of his secret role model, as if in trance, even though the bright light of the screen made his eyes burn and water after only a few minutes of staring. Oikawa was popular, charismatic and good at drawing positive attention to himself. But most importantly, the way, he influenced his numerous subscribers, was probably the key to keeping his volleyball team happy as well. Finally, after all those years, Kageyama had seen through his rival’s tactic.

If Kageyama managed to become an “influenza” (ugh, that word) like Oikawa, he wouldn’t just earn a place in this stupid volleyball magazine and score off Hinata, no. If he found a strategy to influence strangers on the internet as Oikawa did, he would maybe finally be able to inspire his teammates and convince them to follow him on the court. He would become a real leader as he’d always wished to be. A leader, who controlled the match the way a setter was supposed to. He would overcome the last hurdle, that had kept him from exploiting his full potential, and lead Karasuno to nationals. Just thinking about it made him feel tingly all over.

Registration on the website didn’t take long. It was much easier than he would have expected. The screen reflected his crooked smile and sparkling eyes, as he continued to set up his profile, spending a long time just thinking about a fitting username. It had to sound cool and edgy but still relate to him in some way, so that he would be recognized.

The same could be said for profile pictures, that seemed to require a certain “style” to attract attention. They had to look pretty and be edited with as many filters as possible, so he did just that. When Kageyama was finally satisfied with his profile after a few minutes, he grabbed his phone from the nightstand and decided to get some work done. The more photos he took, the more people would care about him, and the sooner he would end up in that fucking magazine. That’s how it worked, right?

He was still a newbie in dealing with social media, but then again, he had Oikawa. Kageyama had always kept an eye on Oikawa playing volleyball in middle school, to allow himself to be inspired, maybe even learn some of his tricks. He would do the same just now, with the faint hope of outdoing his role model at some point.

Hinata was going to regret making fun of him.

\---

 

Kageyama’s past life was one of several great sounding ideas, that turned out to be mistakes in retrospect, some of them more embarrassing than others. Even now he had to realize, that as an absolute beginner on the internet, it had probably not been the best idea to call himself “Swageyama Tobiyolo” on Instagram, post pictures of burned curry and stacked milk cartons under the “aesthetics” hashtag and selfies, on which he either dabbed or posed suggestively with a volleyball.

Apparently, there was still much for him to learn. Among other things, that sometimes, simply imitating your opponents was a bad idea. Some things might better be left to people, who knew what they were doing. Kageyama didn’t have to copy anyone. He had his own weapons to fight with.

While a botched jump-serve, a blocked faint, or an improper receive was embarrassing enough, it would usually only cost them a single point in a match. A few minutes later, most had already forgotten about a silly mishap like that, unless it caused them to lose the whole match.

Unfortunately, the internet had its own rules. And so, after many mocking comments from his class- and teammates, threatening emails from Oikawa with plagiarism allegations, and random love confessions from girls (who had seemed to like the volleyball pinups a bit _too much_ ), Kageyama realized the price one had to pay to become a “trendsetter”. Because no matter how much you regretted a poorly thought-out decision, the Internet didn’t give a fuck about your feelings. The internet just never forgets anything you post. Not even if it’s softcore volleyball porn. Especially not then.


End file.
